From Quality to Information Quality in Official Statistics

Abstract

The term quality of statistical data, developed and used in official statistics and international organizations such as IMF and OECD, refers to usefulness of summary statistics generated by producers of official statistics. Similarly, in context of survey quality, official agencies such as Eurostat, NCSES and Statistics Canada created dimensions for evaluating quality of a survey for obtaining 'accurate survey data'.The concept of Information Quality, or InfoQ, (Kenett and Shmueli, 2014), provides a general framework applicable to data analysis in a broader sense than summary statistics: InfoQ is defined as the potential of a dataset to achieve a specific goal using a given empirical analysis method. It relies on identifying and examining relationships between four components: analysis goal, data, data analysis, and utility. The InfoQ framework relies on eight dimensions used to deconstruct InfoQ and thereby provide an approach for assessing it.We compare and contrast InfoQ framework and dimensions with those typically used by statistical agencies. We discuss how InfoQ approach can support using official statistics not only by government for policy decision making, but also by other stakeholders such as industry by integrating official and organizational data.